The Great 24-Hour Television Experiment Pt.1

I realize that blogging about TV is pretty lame. Not being one to do anything half-ass, I figured the best thing to do is to fully embrace the lameness and do something different with this blog. It is with this sentiment that I bring you...The great 24 hour television experiment. Yes, I plan to watch 24 hours of straight television without sleep. Here are the ground rules:
-24 hours of TV with as few breaks as possible
-I shall not watch any one channel for a total of more than 1 hour, in attempt to get a more well-rounded sampling of television
-No DVDs, no movies, no video games
-No sleep!
I am beginning this stupidity adventure at 3p.m. on Friday afternoon, and will not turn off the television until 3p.m. Saturday. For once I actually don't have to work on Friday night, and this is how I am using the time, man I'm awesome. Of Course, I was not able to convince anyone to partake in this with me, but a few friends agreed to join in for limited periods and will hopefully ease the pain and boredom.
Without further ado, let the games begin:

Lets get it on

3 p.m.

I feel that Dr. Phil is the perfect introduction to the festivities. Today's topic is the reunion of a daughter with her father that killed her mother when she was two years old. It is actually a continuation of yesterday's show, which I obviously did not see. By the end of 30 minutes, I shit you not, The Girlfriend was crying. “This is good TV,” she muttered between sobs. She has never seen Dr. Phil before.

30 minutes in and tears have already been shed, far exceeding my expectations.

The food network is an amazing waste of time. 30 Minute Meals features Rachel Ray (who I don't really think is even a chef), making meals that anyone can supposedly make in “30 minutes or less.” When Rachel Ray talks, I have the feeling her mouth can't keep up with her food lovin' imagination, causing her to talk 400 miles a minute. She managed to make a pretty mediocre pizza, along with bacon-pineapple shrimp.

After watching the food network, I realize I have not gone shopping in quite some time, and may be unprepared for this voluntary house arrest.

Jeopardy makes me feel like a real waste of space doing this experiment. Wayne Cherry is the returning champ. Alex Trebek seems uninspired, and who wouldn't be after 24 years of reading questions off cue cards? The girlfriend and I tied at 15 correct questions each. What I learned: Cuba is the largest Island in the Western hemisphere. Wayne Cherry remained the champion. (By the way, I want to legally change my name to Wayne Cherry because that name is amazing.)

5 p.m.
The hills offered the first hurdle to this. It took a lot of self control to stop myself from turning the channel watching spoiled brats drive around in their BMWs and trying to balance cushy jobs with superficial relationships. Since I don't follow the show, I had a really hard time keeping track of all the relationship triangles. I'm sure this show is plenty entertaining to some people, it's just not my thing.
Best line of the show: “It's my birthday, of course I can say who can come. I'm an American Princess.”

Myth Busters was entertaining enough. They were testing how hard it would be to sell a classic corvette after letting two pig corpses rot inside of it for 2 months and then trying to clean the smell out, as well as something involving storm drains, explosions and raccoons.

At 5:30, the sun began to go down and I began to seriously question this venture. Not only is it a waste of a Friday night, but it seems pretty difficult to pull off. There is also a good possibility that after today, I will not want to watch TV for a LONG time to come...which might not be an entirely bad thing.

I decide to continue for as long as I can...

King of Queens is one of those shows you see every once in a while, but don't realize how long it has been on TV --The show has now been on the air for 9 years.-- And while it is pretty humorous at times (especially any scene containing Jerry Stiller), it is impressive that the show has lasted so long on the same underlying formula of the overweight buffoon husband and the attractive, somewhat overbearing wife. They haven't even had to dip into the “someone get pregnant to liven up the show” box, yet.

There's not much I could say about Seinfeld that someone hasn't said already. It is far and away the best sitcom ever aired on TV. In my life, I've determined that people are either Seinfeld people, or they are not Seinfeld people (usually, these are 'Friends' people, though the two may overlap.) I try to associate with these non-Seinfeld people as little as possible. Tonight's episode was a classic; George buys the cheapest wedding invitations available, and the glue from the envelopes kills his fiance, Susan.

The Miss America pageant has been downgraded to Country Music Television for some reason. I don't know why CMT would want it, or why no network channel would, but what the hell. The host is none other than Mario Lopez, better known as Slater from Saved By The Bell.
The Roommate:“When is Slater going to hit locker and make it magically pop open?”
Miss Oklahoma was the winner, and I couldn't be happier.

I think it may have been all the glitter and high pitched singing, but around the time of Miss America being crowned, a slow but persistent headache began to set in...

7 p.m.
For the second game show of the day, Bob Saget now hosts “1 Vs.100,” a simple concept game where the contestant has to get questions right, and the “mob” of 100 is weeded out by answering questions wrong. It was entertaining for maybe 3 minutes.

In order to combat atrophy, I am doing jumping jacks, push ups and sit ups every couple of hours. Apparently sitting and watching TV burns barely any more calories than sleeping. I will need to make an extra trip to the gym this week to counterbalance this abuse to my body.

Fuel

Nanny 911 features a British woman that producers found to help bad parents control their worse children. The kid on the episode was kicked out of preschool for biting another kid on the crotch. How about some counseling instead of an overbearing woman with an accent? My first yawn made an appearance during this show, and it's not even 8pm. This is not a good sign.

Since I will probably only see a few hundred commercials during this ordeal, I thought it would be a good idea to watch The greatest Super Bowl Commercials Ever. Actually, it was some the the most entertaining TV I have seen so far...which is pretty sad (as a side note, this years Super Bowl commercials were pretty good in comparison to the last few years, especially the Kevin Federline Nationwide life insurance clip:

The Suite Life is a show on the Disney channel, that from what I could pick up features 4 kids who live in a fancy hotel, and appear to be allowed to run rampant, their parents suspiciously absent from the picture. I don't think I understand kids programming these days, and I wish kids were still raised on Duck Tales and Wonder Years, like I was.

My headache was beginning to fade around 9 p.m., so I decided to watch some good Ol' O'Reilly Factor to kick it up a notch.
Bill: “I'll be the first to admit I was wrong in my analysis of the Iraq war. I assumed the Iraqis would want to fight for their freedom, and I was wrong.”
I don't want this blog to get political, so I will restrain myself from saying too much about this. A lot of people do like O'Reilly, so I suppose he must be doing something right, I just don't see it.

I just watched a man bite the head off of a water snake and then eat the rest of it raw, still wriggling. Man vs. Wild is a discovery channel show that puts a some kind of wilderness expert in an desolate location and he then has to survive and make his way back to civilization. I wonder how much of this show is real and how much is scripted, but either way it's impressive. This guy is taming wild horses and biting heads off snakes while I'm eating Funions and watching more television than most do in a week.

As far as drug addictions go, I figure caffeine is a pretty mild one.. I usually have a cup of coffee in the morning, an energy drink sometime in the afternoon, and several cups of tea at night. I am also well aware of how caffeine affects me. I have pulled plenty of all-nighters in my college career and know that trying to stay caffeinated the whole time is a really bad idea. At 10pm, i figured it was a good time to down the first of two energy drinks i purchased in preparation. As a side note, I have tried well over a dozen different energy drinks, and in my opinion Bawls (carried at most 7-11's) is the best.

The girlfriend, for some reason, likes a show called “What Not To Wear” on TLC (which I think stands for The Learning Channel, though I'm not sure what I am supposed to learn). On the show, a couple of cocky fashionistas find someone who they think dresses horribly, throws away all their clothes, and forces them to go on a shopping spree to make them look more presentable. Apparently the victim's friends and family sign them up for this show. I can't wait to come home and find out that the people in my life feel like a dress like such a bum that I need an intervention. The hostess keeps referring to breasts as “the puppies,” which makes me uncomfortable. Thank you, The Learning Channel, for learnin' me some fashion.

The puppies

I have also decided to pay close attention to commercial advertisements during this. For the sake of entertainment, I am comparing frequency of certain type of commercials. First is beer/junk food commercials versus diet pill commercials. And the winner is.....beer and junk food by a score of 13 to 7.

After 8 hours –or an average workday-- I am only a third of the way towards my goal. Stay tuned for the next installment....